Billions spent for porn sad loss to society

ST. GEORGE — The numbers are as shocking as they are incomprehensible — $3 million spent every second, $13 billion spent every year. And that's just in America. Around the world the number is nearly $100 billion.

And for what? NFL season tickets? National health care? Nuclear arsenals? Golf gear? Women's shoes?

None of the above.

Porn.

Every year America spends $13.4 billion and the world spends $96.7 billion on its porn habit.

Pamela Atkinson isn't a materialistic person. But the noted longtime advocate for the homeless and the hungry audibly sighs when she recites the above figures.

"Do you know how many times I look at that (amount) and think how many affordable housing units and how much food that would buy?" she says.

Pamela is at the Dixie Center on a Saturday morning greeting attendees at the Utah Coalition Against Pornography (UCAP) fall convention in southern Utah.

It's 8 in the morning, the dawning of a beautiful weekend day with high temperatures forecast in the mid-70s — a perfect day to be outside — and already hundreds of people are filing into the convention center.

By the time Attorney General Mark Shurtleff gives his kickoff keynote address at 9 a.m., a thousand people are registered and in their seats.

"Zero of them have to be here," observes Janet Hill, who, like Pamela, serves on the UCAP board.

They're here, she says, because they want to be. They're relatives of someone with a porn problem, they're therapists or teachers, they're parents, they're spouses, they're addicts themselves.

"They are people looking for hope," sums up Atkinson.

Whatever their various individual purposes, it's an impressive group collectively, filling up a ballroom and giving up a morning for the cause — an army marching against pornography.

But it's nothing compared to the size of the opposition.

UCAP is full of numbers. Here are some more: There are 372 million pornographic Web pages on the Internet … visits to these pages comprise 25 percent of all search engine requests … and that doesn't even count the 11,000 adult movies that are produced each year (Hollywood produces about 600 first-run movies annually).